Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain: From Crowd to People, 1766-1868 [Hardcover]

This book addresses the changing relationships among political participation, political representation, and popular mobilization in Spain from the 1766 protest in Madrid against the early Bourbon reforms until the citizen revolution of 1868 that first introduced universal suffrage and led to the ousting of the monarchy.

Popular Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain shows that a notion of the crowd internally dividing the concept of people existed before the advent of Liberalism, allowing for the enduring subordination of popular participation to representation in politics.

In its wider European and colonial American context, the study analyzes semantic changes in a range of cultural spheres, from parliamentary debate to historical narrative and aesthetics. It shows how Liberalism had trouble reproducing the legitimacy of limited suffrage and traces the evolution of an imagination on democracy that would allow for the reconfigurationof an all-encompassing image of the people eventually overcoming representative government.

Focused on the nation and identities, Spanish historiography had a pending debt with that other historical subject of modernity, the people. With this book, Pablo S?nchez Le?n starts cancelling the debt with an innovative methodology combining conceptual history with social and political history. Brilliantly, this books also proposes a novel chronology for modern history and renewed categories of analysis. In many senses, this is an extraordinarily renovating senior work.

Jos? Mar?a Portillo Vald?s, University of the Basque Country, Spain 

This book by Pablo S?nchez Le?n is an original and detailed study of one of the essential components of modernity, the relation between the concepts of plebe and pueblo. The autl³3